I had the won­der­ful oppor­tu­nity to have the grand­son for a week­end here lately. It was the best of times.

Today I finally got around to pack­ing away all the toys I had drug out to play with him that were still lurk­ing in boxes in the base­ment. Try­ing to be a good and respon­si­ble per­son, for the first time in my life I remem­bered to remove all the bat­ter­ies, from all the toys, so they would not corrode.

Sim­ple you say? No. The kid is a techno geek in the mak­ing, at 18 months,  and anything…and I do mean ANYTHING that clicks, clangs, buzzes, rings, tweets, zaps, hums, talks, and oth­er­wise makes a noise sim­i­lar to his par­ents “toys” makes him a happy camper for hours on end. True you have to alter­nate fre­quently to avoid bore­dom, and he will let you know by dropping/throwing said toy down and mov­ing on, but he is yet at that age where an hour later it is again exciting.

That being said…48 bat­ter­ies later.….did I say FORTY-EIGHT?? I am think­ing my next stock option will be in recharge­able bat­ter­ies. Or I could stop buy­ing him toys that click, clang, buzz, ring, tweet, zap, hum, talk.….….

Nah.…it’s way too fun watch­ing him push every sin­gle but­ton on every toy to see what it will do! So I sug­gest you too get your stock option now…this kid is going places!!!

I just renewed my dri­vers license yes­ter­day. It is good for 5 years. When I renew again I will be COUGH #%@**@%@# HACK*@##%@**&@@# turn­ing 63.

That puts a whole new per­spec­tive on life.

Crap.

Crib up-check
stuffed animals-check
books in place-check
toys in boxes-check
cup­boards locked-check
diapers-check
butt wipes-check
balmex-check
kidlet food-check
whole milk-check
three fun filled days-check
grandkid.…..????????

One of our few tra­di­tions around here at Christ­mas time is buy­ing nuts in bulk. It is the only time they sell them that way around here. So I buy alot of almonds and wal­nuts and restock the bowl until they are gone.  For some rea­son they lasted longer this year. Today my hus­band ate the last wal­nut. Back in the drawer go the nut cracker and picker. Back in the cup­board the bowl. Christ­mas is over. Sob.

I was dri­ving home from town today and hap­pened to hear on the news that Sam’s Club was ter­mi­nat­ing ten thou­sand jobs and would be out­sourc­ing them. I imme­di­ately called a friend I know who works part time there and when she picked up, asked how she was. Her response was “fine con­sid­er­ing we were ter­mi­nated this morning.”

Here’s how it went down. They were emailed and called yes­ter­day and told that there was a manda­tory meet­ing today at 8 AM. She and her co-workers showed up and they were taken to a back stor­age area and lead into a “room” made up of pal­lets of mer­chan­dise in which tables and chairs had been placed in the mid­dle leav­ing only one open­ing. The room was cold. They were told that all of them, from part-timers to full timers and man­agers of the demo crew were ter­mi­nated imme­di­ately. They were given a few min­utes to ask ques­tions. No they did not get sev­er­ance, no exten­sion of ben­e­fits. Nada. For sev­eral of the peo­ple this was their only job. They were given no noti­fi­ca­tion it was com­ing. They were escorted back to their lock­ers to get coats and per­sonal stuff. The man­ager was not even allowed to go in to where she’d been doing the sched­ules for next week to get her glasses or jacket. What.…did they think she’d steal some­thing? Then they were escorted out of the build­ing. Inter­est­ingly enough, although none of them are allowed to work any­more, they are not offi­cially ter­mi­nated until Feb­ru­ary 5th. If I had a way of find­ing out why that is, because I am pretty damn sure it has some ben­e­fit for Wal-Mart, I’d find out and plas­ter it in every news­pa­per in the coun­try. The meet­ings were held simul­ta­ne­ously across the coun­try at 8 this morn­ing. Ten thou­sand peo­ple ter­mi­nated in one swoop.  And this is a com­pany “for the peo­ple?” Are you jok­ing? What under­handed, mean, secre­tive behav­ior from a com­pany towards it’s “val­ued employees.”

I, for one, will never, ever, set foot in a Wal-Mart or Sam’s Club again. I don’t care how poor we may get. This is yet another in a long line of crappy employ­ment prac­tices by a mega com­pany and it sucks.  They take advan­tage of a poor econ­omy, and instead of help­ing they cre­ate unimag­in­able hard­ships for employ­ees whose only crime was to show up for every shift when they were sup­posed to, glad to have a job to go to.

Oh. And they ter­mi­nated there Sam Club cards effec­tive imme­di­ately. Nice touch jerks.

There are days, and then there are days.…..

My hus­band, busy sort­ing papers last night, did not get to bed til after 2 AM.  Know­ing this, I decided this morn­ing to not wake him, and instead, leave him a note when I left to go to town to clean our office and then attend a cau­cus. Now the temps had risen, then fallen, so there had been some dis­cus­sion about him tak­ing me to my des­ti­na­tions if the roads were bad, but since the temps had risen and were hov­er­ing around 32, and the radio guy said the roads were just wet,  I fig­ured there was no prob­lem dri­ving myself. It was rain­ing and things were pretty slushy, but I headed out, know­ing if I could get to the black­top I was good. My first hint of pos­si­ble dis­as­ter was when I sunk into the muck and started fish­tail­ing down the dri­ve­way. Because it is down­hill I made it, but I knew there was no way in hell I’d make it to the black­top as it was up hill thru even worse slushed up gravel. Mak­ing an imme­di­ate deci­sion, I decided if I could get back up the dri­ve­way I could con­tinue to let my hus­band sleep and just wake him if I needed to, to take me to the cau­cus. Only by gun­ning the car was I able to make it back up the dri­ve­way and with shak­ing hands put my undam­aged car in the garage. By the time I got every­thing back out of the car I was soaked, as it was now rain­ing pretty hard. I got in the house, took off my drip­ping coat and decided to go into the den to see exactly what the temp was on our out­door ther­mome­ter. Thank God I did, as water was run­ning in streams down the walls. Need­less to say my hus­band was rudely awak­ened by my pan­icked “WE HAVE WATER RUNNING INTO THE HOUSE” wake up call.
Now over the course of the last week I have spent sev­eral days get­ting the ice jam off the west side of our house. I knew there was snow piled in the cor­ner where the water was now com­ing in, but I also knew I could not pos­si­bly get a lad­der thru the 4 foot drifts to get the snow off so just hoped God and warm weather coop­er­ated for a nice slow thaw. NOT. So we spent the bet­ter part of the morn­ing, in rain, try­ing to get the ice dam off the roof. We were soaked. Gloves were soaked and we used every pair in the house. Pants were soaked. Boots were soaked. Tow­els to catch the water drip­ping down walls were soaked. We used picks, salt, hot water and what ever we could think of and finally got the ice out and all the gut­ters opened so they could drain. And it rained harder. Need­less to say the cau­cus never hap­pened. And the drip­ping in the house stopped. And I spent the rest of the after­noon wash­ing and dry­ing every­thing. The guy that came to take the slush off the dri­ve­way said the gravel was almost impos­si­ble. And it is worse then ice when it gets like this. So I’m think­ing I’d cheer­fully take out the peo­ple that “just love a Jan­u­ary thaw”.  Get me their names.

My hus­band and I have been very lucky in that any time a major thing like this has hap­pened we have been home.….the fur­nace break­ing down in the mid­dle of win­ter, the pheas­ant fly­ing thru the liv­ing room win­dow, the tree com­ing down on the roof, the base­ment flood­ing, the roof in the kitchen leak­ing water every­where and now this. And for all you renters…you want to be home own­ers because???????

In the Celes­tine Prophecy it talks about every­thing hap­pen­ing for a rea­son. If I had made it up the road and safely to all the places I intended to go, I am pretty sure the water would not have been dis­cov­ered until I got home around 3 or 4, if at all,  at which time the wall and the floor would have been ruined as that room is not fre­quented by my hus­band unless pass­ing thru to the closet and even then I don’t know if he’d noticed it or not and I cer­tainly, at that time of day, would not have used the room. We wouldn’t have had the day­light to spend hours get­ting the dam off and every­thing would have been so much worse. So as much as I hate that the roads were too slushy to go down, and that I missed the cau­cus, and that I now have to clean the office tomor­row, I am ever so grate­ful events hap­pened as they did. What a day.

You know how you kind of learn how many steps there are in or around your house so you don’t pay any atten­tion? You kind of skip down them not even think­ing, until one day you miss one and every­thing feels off ’cause you didn’t land on the foot you always land on, or your foot is sus­pended in mid air? Or you know exactly how many steps to the bath­room, but not really as you’ve never counted them, you just know how it FEELS? Well I kept won­der­ing why it felt weird lately every time I came in from out­side and it dawned on me today that our bot­tom step is gone. Well, not gone. The step is still there but the snow on the side­walk is even with the step so instead of 3 steps into the house there are now 2. How I didn’t notice before is beyond me. How there can still be that much snow on the side­walk is even a big­ger ques­tion. Now with this new, crusty, sleet frozen top­ping on it every­thing is so much more fun! And they’re say­ing rain for Sat­ur­day then a cold front mov­ing in? And it’s still only Jan­u­ary? Sheesh.

It is a bit dis­con­cert­ing when, you go in to go to the bath­room and the water in your toi­let tank is gen­tly sway­ing to and fro. It does give you pause. This is not the first time I have observed this strange phe­nom­e­non. I have just cho­sen to ignore it. Here are my thoughts. “Hmm…that’s strange.” “Hmmm…wonder if we are hav­ing an earth­quake?” “Hmm…wonder if I should call some­one.” You get the gist. I always, and I am so proud of myself, go first to the base­ment to make sure no sewage is enter­ing the house thru the base­ment drain, and then peak out the back door to make sure the sewer gas pipe is still in place and not bent, then I check the ground to see if there is any sink­ing, or tell­tale bub­bling, and can I just say in win­ter with 4 ft. snow drifts that is con­sid­er­ably eas­ier?.  If all things equal a no I sort of for­get about it and hope I don’t get splashed. Now I am won­der­ing if I shouldn’t track this as we are once again hav­ing a sleet/ice/rain/snow fun day and if the two aren’t con­nected? I don’t know why they would be but it seems alot more fun then call­ing a plumber and hav­ing him come out and pay him to stand there and go “Hmmmm”. I am per­fectly capa­ble of that myself and I’m lots cheaper. So as much as it puz­zles me I will prob­a­bly ignore it this time. Life on a farm is noth­ing but fun. Am think­ing mild earthquake.….hmmmm.

Well that title is a bit mis­lead­ing as I will have many thoughts on Haiti in the days to come but just a cou­ple of things.…

Am hop­ing the Domini­can Repub­lic and Haiti can set aside their dif­fer­ences long enough to see this thing through. They are not the best of neigh­bors so we can only hope.

My hus­band and I were lis­ten­ing to a talk show the other night and although I dis­agreed with some of the things the com­men­ta­tor said about Haiti, he did give me pause. He started his con­ver­sa­tion with the fact that what he had to say wasn’t prob­a­bly polit­i­cally cor­rect given what is hap­pen­ing in Haiti. He then went on to make a few obser­va­tions. The first being, and he did not deny that Haiti needs imme­di­ate human­i­tar­ian help and money as this is an unqual­i­fied dis­as­ter, but that he hopes, in the years to come, that we exam­ine our desire as a nation to keep giv­ing money to a coun­try as poor as Haiti when it is obvi­ous it is not going where it needs to go. The fig­ure he threw out, which I am sorry to say I don’t remem­ber except that it was huge, regard­ing the amount of money we have sent to Haiti in non-disaster times , stag­gered me. See­ing the des­o­late homes, and the obvi­ous poverty backed up against a pres­i­den­tial palace to suit the fussi­est of lead­ers, it strikes me that the money did not go to the peo­ple. There are only a cou­ple hos­pi­tals and 2 doc­tors for every thou­sand peo­ple. There is no obvi­ous emer­gency per­son­nel, no great amounts of police/security, so where did the money go? The sec­ond point he made, and he was really try­ing to be respect­ful of what is going on over there, is that every time they showed some­one being dug out of a home, it was usu­ally the rel­a­tives and then the cam­era spanned to show thou­sands of able-bodied peo­ple sim­ply walk­ing around. His ques­tion was, “why aren’t they help­ing? Why isn’t every able-bodied per­son any­where near a col­lapsed build­ing, doing every­thing they can to try to see if there are peo­ple there?” Instead they are milling around wait­ing for help to arrive. He says he thinks we have taught them this apa­thy by giv­ing them money time after time and not expect­ing some sort of result from it…kind of like you give a man a fish story.….

It is cer­tainly a point to pon­der. And what he observed is true. I’d think there was a bit of shock going on but after 911 every­one, and I mean every­one pitched in here.

A cou­ple other things to pon­der. He also said that when San Fran­cisco had their last quake it was the same mag­ni­tude. 63 peo­ple died com­pared to the hun­dred thou­sand they are pre­dict­ing for Haiti. If the money sent to them had gone to make struc­tures that would with­stand as best they could, an earth­quake, if they had laws that said their build­ings HAD to be built that way, the events that are tak­ing place may have been averted.

Haiti has had 96 coup attempts over the course of its his­tory accord­ing to this man. I had no idea.  How does one go about see­ing that human­i­tar­ian aid against awful poverty such as they have goes where it should, when the gov­ern­ment doesn’t even know what it wants or how to exist.

There will be so many orphans from this dis­as­ter that it makes my heart hurt. Of course we will con­tinue to give. Of course we will con­tinue to help. And there are cer­tainly things worth pondering.

I don’t know how. I don’t know where. I don’t know who. I do know that the mess that is the relief effort into Haiti, the mess of get­ting sim­ple water and food in, the mess of NO one being in con­trol or coor­di­nat­ing efforts to help these peo­ple, the mess of air­ports open­ing and shut­ting, the mess of it tak­ing days to get help, has to stop. This is an epic dis­as­ter and if we don’t learn some­thing from this, if we don’t learn how to have a 1st respon­der ini­tial team in place some­where, espe­cially with all the tech­nol­ogy avail­able to us, then we ought to be ashamed. Money is flow­ing in. Help is not. This can­not hap­pen again. Any­where. Any­time. Period.